John Duffy, a Composer Who Gave His Peers a Platform, Dies at 89

John Duffy, the founder and longtime director of Meet the Composer, an organization created to promote contemporary music and place composers in residence with American orchestras, died on Dec. 22 at his home in Norfolk, Va. He was 89.

The cause was cancer, Dr. Richard Moriarty, the executor of his estate, said.

Mr. Duffy was a prolific composer of symphonic music and operas, with a long history of writing for the stage, television and documentary film. While still in his 20s, he was named music director of Arthur Lithgow’s “Shakespeare Under the Stars” festival at Antioch College in Ohio, responsible for providing the incidental music for its productions.

He went on to hold similar posts at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven and the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Conn., under John Houseman, its artistic director in the late 1950s. He wrote the scores for numerous plays both on and off Broadway, notably J. P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man” and the political satire “MacBird!”

In 1974 the New York State Council on the Arts asked Mr. Duffy to revive a troubled new-music program called Composer in Performance, which had sputtered to a halt after five years for lack of money. Mr. Duffy proposed a new initiative that he called Meet the Composer, a more inviting, inclusive name inspired by his reading of Walt Whitman.

As director, Mr. Duffy approached concert promoters with a deal: If you program new music, Meet the Composer will send the composer to talk to the audience about the piece. Two years later, keen to reach audiences outside New York, he established Meet the Composer branches across the country.

“There was a tremendous gulf between concertgoers and composers,” he told The New York Times in 1990. “So when an opportunity to help other composers came up, I knew very clearly what needed to be done.” Before long, the organization was supporting some 8,000 performances yearly.

In 1982 he set up underwriting to place composers in residence with American orchestras, where, in theory, they would offer advice on contemporary programming and promote the work of living composers. By 1990, 32 orchestras had composers in residence, in a variety of roles.

The program enjoyed notable successes, chief among them Horizons, the summer festivals of contemporary music that Jacob Druckman, organized at the New York Philharmonic. John Adams enjoyed a close working relationship with the San Francisco Symphony under the program. Other partnerships turned out to be less productive. Most orchestras, once the underwriting disappeared, dropped the idea.

“The specific program itself was not self-supporting; that’s true,” Ed Harsh, who became president of Meet the Composer in 2007, told Chamber Music magazine in 2011. “But the way that the orchestra field thought of the role of a composer — whether it be a composer-in-residence or having a composer onsite for a performance at a minimum level or just a positive force in their repertoire — that absolutely changed.”

John Charles Patrick Duffy was born on June 23, 1926, in Manhattan, one of 14 children of Irish immigrant parents. He grew up in the Woodlawn neighborhood of the Bronx, where he took up the piano and drums as a teenager, sang in the church choir and played in a dance band during high school.

Although under age, he enlisted in the Navy during World War II and saw action at the Battle of Okinawa. After being discharged, he studied composition with Henry Cowell and Solomon Rosowsky at what is now the New School and with Aaron Copland for two summers at Tanglewood.

He had eclectic tastes. Before beginning his shift as a night watchman at the B. Altman department store, he often visited jazz clubs to hear the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and jazz would later be central to Meet the Composer.

“They think that when you say Meet the Composer, it means ‘serious’ music, in quotes,” he told The Times in 1990, describing his encounters with music presenters. “They don’t think about the fact that what Ornette Coleman does is composition. We like to enlighten people.”

Mr. Duffy’s more than 300 compositions included several works inspired by contemporary events and personalities. He composed the second movement of “Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Concert Band” in honor of the four girls killed in a 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Ala., and his opera “Muhammad Ali” (2000), directly addressed the boxer’s political views. “Black Water,” first performed in 1997, was based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel about the death in 1969 of Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned when a car being driven by Senator Edward M. Kennedy went off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass.

His television scores won two Emmy awards, the first in 1980 for the NBC special “A Talent for Life: Jews of the Italian Renaissance,” the second in 1985 for “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews,” a PBS documentary narrated by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban.

Mr. Duffy left Meet the Composer in 1996. After merging with the American Music Center in 2011, it was renamed New Music USA.

In 2005 he founded the John Duffy Composers Institute at the Virginia Arts Festival in Norfolk, a summer seminar to teach the basics of writing for musical theater.

Mr. Duffy is survived by a daughter, Maura Duffy; a brother, Charles, known as Bud; three sisters, Margaret Gruenfeldt, Virginia Rochileau and Eileen Duffy; a stepson, Mark Whitney Gilkey; a grandson; and a step-granddaughter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: John Duffy, 89, Composer Who Aided Contemporaries. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe